Multi-scale feature tracking in sequential satellite images with wavelet analysis to measure sea surface currents in the Gulf of St. Lawrence

Abstract

Measuring sea surface currents is a technological challenge in oceanography. Feature tracking in time series of remote sensing imagery has been proposed as a way to address this problem. The most commonly used approach is the maximum cross-correlation (MCC) method, originally developed to track cloud motion. We propose a new technique that makes use of Daubechies wavelet analysis combined with the MCC method. In our approach, satellite images are decomposed into various spatial scales using the wavelet transform, and the location with the MCC coefficient among all the scales is selected as the most likely new position of the tracked feature. Results from the analysis of five pairs of sequential National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration (NOAA) advanced very high resolution radiometer (AVHRR) images of the Gulf of St. Lawrence area show that wavelet analysis improves the estimated sea surface current field by increasing the number of current vectors about 20% under the same confidence level (0.9) as compared with that using the MCC method alone.